Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

June 16, 2026

Duration

2h 8m

Channel

Dwarkesh Podcast

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Had Ada Palmer back on – this time to talk about Machiavelli, perhaps the most misunderstood thinker of all time. Machiavelli cut his teeth as a high-level diplomat for Florence, a position from which he got to closely observe the most important rulers in Europe at the time, including the ones who were on the path to destroying his dearly beloved Florence. In 1513 the Medici retook control of Florence and, wrongly suspecting Machiavelli of participating in a coup attempt, fired, tortured, and exiled him. Machiavelli could have fled his exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents. Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career’s lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici. But at least the Medici were in a position to use his insights to defend Florence. Machiavelli the patriot did not want any other hands to touch this book, because those hands, armed with these lessons, might pose an existential danger to Florence. The closest modern analogy, at least as Machiavelli would have seen it, would be Szilard’s letter warning FDR about the possibility of a nuclear fission bomb. What were those insights? And how were they inspired by Machiavelli’s dangerous diplomatic missions all across Europe, and his extensive reading of antiquity? Watch this episode with Ada Palmer to find out! By the way, Ada is launching a new podcast which I’m very excited about. The first season will be about Machiavelli – a perfect way to dive deeper into the topics we discussed in this episode. Subscribe at Beforecast’s website to be notified of the first episode: https://beforecast-seven.vercel.app/ Subscribe on YouTube: @Beforecast Follow her on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/adapalmer Check out her FixTheNews Podcast episode: https://savingtheworldpod.transistor.fm/ And if you want even more Ada check out her books and more: https://www.adapalmer.com/ 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒

• Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer-2
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ada-palmer-machiavelli-is-the-most-misunderstood/id1516093381?i=1000772996754
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Wx4gaPNEuauMODv8W2XTA?si=Bzfl_SSvSXCr4Xh4u2Q6lg

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Cursor recently saved one of my podcast recordings. When a video file from a shoot came out corrupted, I pointed Cursor at it: it recovered the footage on its own, tracking down the right reference file from the file’s metadata and realigning the out-of-sync audio. My whole team now uses Cursor for everyday tasks, not just coding. Get started at https://cursor.com/dwarkesh

• Jane Street’s hiring process has been going viral on Twitter lately. The memes are pretty funny, but I wanted to see what their interviews were actually like. So I had Ricson, one of Jane Street’s ML researchers, walk me through a retired puzzle: he gave me an image dataset where 50% of the files had been corrupted – I had to figure out how to recover them. If you’re interested in these sorts of puzzles, you can find Jane Street’s open roles at https://janestreet.com/dwarkesh

• Crusoe is turning the AI datacenter buildout into an industrial process. At their massive Colorado factory, they assemble Spark units, modular datacenters with power, cooling, and fire suppression built in. They also manufacture specific components in-house to skip the longest lead times. Crusoe has experience running these Spark units on a range of energy sources, including solar and used EV batteries, ensuring they don’t get bottlenecked by grid availability. Learn more at https://crusoe.ai/dwarkesh To sponsor a future episode, visit https://dwarkesh.com/advertise. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 00:00:00 – How Florence bargained with Cesare Borgia for survival 00:15:08 – Machiavelli’s analytical innovations 00:23:58 – Why popes became warlords 00:36:13 – Why the common people demanded nepotism 00:47:57 – Cesare Borgia brought terror to rulers and justice to the people 00:57:55 – Art as a proxy for war 01:06:41 – Florence, a city famous in hell 01:15:57 – The Prince was a job application to Machiavelli’s torturers 01:41:39 – During the Renaissance, original ideas had to be couched in antiquity 01:50:44 – Why copyright began with the Inquisition 02:02:12 – Machiavelli wasn't Machiavellian

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Dwarkesh Patel

  host

  Podcast host and interviewer of the Dwarkesh Patel channel.

• Ada Palmer

  guest

  Historian at the University of Chicago and science fiction author, specializing in Renaissance/early modern intellectual history.

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Dwarkesh Podcast, featuring Dwarkesh Patel and Ada Palmer, Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer explores ada Palmer reframes Machiavelli through Renaissance instability, patronage, and politics Machiavelli wrote The Prince amid cascading regime changes across Italian city-states and an unusually destabilizing papacy whose non-hereditary succession encouraged abrupt policy reversals and power grabs.

🔗 RELATED EPISODES

The better AI gets, the smaller its share of the economy might get – Alex Imas and Phil Trammell

What rebuilding AlphaGo teaches us about self-play, RL, and future of LLMs - Eric Jang

How GPT, Claude, and Gemini are actually trained and served – Reiner Pope

Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?

Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AI

Elon Musk – "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”